MUSIC SCENE: 25 years and counting for Adam Duritz and his Crows

Jay N. Miller / For The Patriot Ledger

Friday

Jun 29, 2018 at 3:01 AM

As it happens we are chatting with Counting Crows singer and songwriter Adam Duritz on the very day that the parade is scheduled to celebrate the latest NBA championship by his beloved Golden State Warriors. As it happens the Los Angeles area-based frontman, originally from Berkeley, opted to avoid the victory parade, but he is eager to discuss basketball.

"I decided I could forego the parade, but I was in Cleveland for the end of it, the final series" Duritz related. "That was really something and we enjoyed it very much. But I love that team you guys have there in Boston, because I knew Jaylen Brown from when he played at Cal. He's an incredible gifted player, and that whole team is loaded. Wait until you get a full year of Kyrie and Gordon Hayward!"

Actually we're not connecting just to talk hoops, but to talk about the "25 Years and Counting Tour" his band started on Wednesday 40-odd dates through Sept. 23 across North America, with the band Live opening. The Counting Crows tour swings through this area on Aug. 17, when it plays the Xfinity Center in Mansfield. (Tickets are scaled from $24 to $212).

Duritz has also joined the list of folks with podcasts, turning his conversations with writer pal James Campion into compelling weekly discussions that might range far afield from music. ("Underwater Sunshine," countingcrows.com/podcast)

Counting Crows, as many fans know, began as a duo with Duritz and guitarist David Bryson in the Bay Area in the early 1990s. But they'd expanded to a rock band by the time of their 1993 debut album, "August and Everything After," which included the smash hit single "Mr. Jones" and started them off on a sparkling career that has led to seven studio albums and over 20 million albums sold since then. Durtiz' introspective lyrics and expressive vocals have prompted comparisons to Van Morrison, while the band's sound evokes comparisons to Bob Dylan and The Band's classic 'Blonde on Blonde' period. Some of their most popular songs have included "Hangingaround," "A Long December," and "American Girls" among many others.

Counting Crows has always been a remarkable band in concert, and we can remember seeing one of their first tours, on a double bill with Cracker around the time of that 1993-94 first national tour, as we mentioned to Duritz.

"Yes, with Cracker at The Paradise in Boston," he said. "I remember that, it was a great tour. We were very lucky when we started out, to be able to play with people like that, opening for Cracker, and Suede and The Cranberries."

In 2009, they toured in a package with Michael Franti and the rock band Augustana, in something called 'The Saturday Night Rebel Rockers Travelling Circus and Medicine Show,' where a major focus was having all three acts mingle and jam every night. (That tour had a memorable stop at Cohasset's South Shore Music Circus). Perhaps four years ago Counting Crows performed as headliners at Blue Hills Bank Pavilion in Boston on another tour, where they did a representative sample of their songbook, yet re-imagined and re-arranged the songs so substantially they sounded like new material — a technique Dylan has also favored.

"The Travelling Circus Tour was really fun," said Duritz, 53. "Those musicians were all really creative, and we really had a blast. We were onstage all night, about four hours total, but it was so enjoyable to be jamming and trading tunes with them. We were inspired to do that tour because we had done a bunch of co-headlining tours, but felt all the fans were getting less than you wanted. We would make a ton of money on those co-headlining tours, but you'd be putting on shows that were so short you were really limited. We wanted to do more of what we wanted to play and what you--the audience--wanted to hear, which was often the different bands jamming together. So, instead of doing 65-75-minute sets, we had the chance to be onstage for four hours. The Travelling Circus was great."

"That later tour with all the reinvention?" Duritz said. "That kind of thing has been a near-constant thing with us. We all have the mindset of not settling with our music--we've always messed around, and changed things like that. The songs are like living things to me, and they grow and evolve over time, and that's how they remain fresh."

Counting Crows' tours have always been marked by some tasty covers, done in their own unique interpretations. And fans can't forget that their 2011 album, "Underwater Sunshine," was a collection of covers from other musicians, some famous--like Travis, Dawes, The Faces--and some not so famous--like The Romany Rye. Now Duritz is curating a festival called 'Underwater Sunshine' in New York City on October 12-13, designed to showcase musicians deserving wider notice.

"Well, we have put on a few of our 'Outlaw Road Shows' over the years, several in Austin, Nashville, New York," Duritz explained. "It was a case of a bunch of us splitting off to do our own things. Then I started the podcast. But I love the name 'Underwater Sunshine,' so figured why not use it for the festival too? The whole idea is to shed a little light on things that don't get much notice, and I thought the name was funny."

"The festival is kind of an extension of some of our conversations in the podcast," Duritz added. "We're right in the middle of the movie business, around Los Angeles, so James and I would talk all day about who was good and who was not. Then, of course, we're all music geeks, so we just had to shove down each other's throats what we thought about what we'd heard lately. There's so much music out there, that just talking about what we like gives us plenty of material. It's also like a peer group for me. In Austin, or L.A., or Boston there's a real music scene. But from where I'm at, unless you're hanging out at somebody's house, you sort of have to have your own peer group. That was the first idea behind the Outlaw Road Shows--surrounding myself with a group of like-minded people."

Diverting from talking about the tour for a bit, how did the podcast originate?

"I really love the podcast--it's my favorite thing to do," Duritz declared. "James and I were doing an interview, and did a series of them over a year. We decided we had way more material than James needed, so we thought, 'Let's do a book.' So on that basis we would simply hang out for four or five hours weekly, just talking about various things. It turned into way more than even a book could hold. Why not try a podcast? It's like our own little radio show."

"It was complete (bleep) at first," Duritz admitted, "and we didn't even put out the first eight ones we did. Then gradually it got better. We talk about music, movies, stuff like what is better: the original 'The Avengers' or 'Infinity Wars'? So the format is us talking for about 90 minutes, with no music per se. But we're always talking about music, like we had a recent discussion about Ella Fitzgerald, telling everyone 'you've really GOT to listen to her stuff, it's incredible.' Like I said--we're music geeks--but it is really fun to do."

Circling back to the summer's tour, Counting Crows are happy to be sharing it with old tour-mates Live, and the 25th Anniversary of their debut offers the chance to explore all aspects of their songbook.

"We'll just be playing stuff from throughout our catalog," said Duritz. "One of the ideas behind this is that we will be doing songs that we don't do every year, so we've had to refresh our memories a bit. It's all going to be in there, the setlists will change a lot, and I think it'll be fun for fans and for us too."

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